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How to Generate Backlinks from Search Traffic from Brand Keywords

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Recently a site I was working on experienced a huge spike in search traffic from branded keywords. The site was fairly new and no major link building had taken place, and we hadn't worked on approaching any bloggers or media outlets for editorial links. Yet when reviewing our web analytics, we noticed that the spike in traffic were from keywords related to our company name.

Although pleasantly surprised, I drove myself nuts trying to look for the source of all this traffic so I can see if I could somehow replicate it in the future. They weren't showing up in my direct referrer traffic in analytics and I couldn't find them using the typical vanity searches in Google. If there was a website that mentioned us, but didn't link to us, I was already planning on how to capitalize on it from a link building perspective.

Since link building is one of the more challenging aspects of SEO, I thought I'd share a couple of quick ways to capitalize on this anonymous spike in traffic from branded keywords (NOTE: This is a bit of a headsmacking tip as Rand would call it. But might be useful for some of you out there):

1) Find the Source

If you find yourself getting a bump up in type-in traffic or an increase in traffic from branded keywords, it indicates that there could be a website out there that mentioned you but hasn't linked to you. First, find the source of the free publicity (using some advanced search operators). Hopefully the free publicity is from a website. If you still aren't able to find the source, try querying for misspelled terms or variations (this is how I found the source of the free publicity, it was a variation of our company name).

2) Ensure any Web Publicity Links Back To You

Once you find the website that's generating this traffic for you, kindly email them saying thank you for the free publicity and ask if they could link back to you. Most webmasters are kind enough to do this b/c it benefits their readers and just makes sense. If you're having trouble coming up with a nicely worded & effective email, Aaron Wall has some nice tips on how to draft an email request for links.

3) Evaluate the Anchor Text Link You're About to Request

You could easily stop at step two and settle for a backlink using branded keywords as the anchor text. But since unsolicited editorial backlinks are tough to come by, you could take advantage of the opportunity and request the anchor text to be one of your target keywords. They could easily turn you down and just use your company name as the anchor text for your backlink, but on the upside you could potentially get a nice juicy editorial link with some tough to come by keywords in the anchor text.

So there it is. If done right, you just got yourself a nice, juicy, keyword-rich backlink from a likely valuable, trustworthy editorial source. Enjoy!

About MarcBitanga —
Marc is the Online Customer Acquisition Manager for HootSuite. He started his career in digital marketing in 1995 and has worked in a number of different industries from Fortune 500 enterprises to start-ups with companies such as SAP, Suite101.com, Electronic Arts EA SPORTS division, & Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers. His favorite thing about SEO is the people he gets to meet and work with in the industry.

As many other emarketer, I would totally agree with brand keywords traffic generated. This is like one of the first keyword to optimise.

Puting your Brand in the title will increase trafic from SERPs and also increase your notoriety. Google Also monitor the CTR from your results in the results, so higher CTR gives better chances to stay high ranked.

BUT, nowadays lots of people also use google search bar to query your brand website in order to go on it, rather than to use the URL bar and enter the URL, that makes the brand keyword more like a notoriety indicator.

New GG Analytics features allow now to build segment, so I advice people to create a segment including "brand", "brand.com", "www.brand.com", etc queries to comparethe search terms with this segment and to watch if the notoriety segment is important but not the most important segment, think about the long tail of keyword and manage time to get ranks from all other keyword from your market...

the random links are sometimes the best, but they also seem the hardest to change to your particular anchor text espcially old sites that are still strong in link juice, but no-one looking after the site.

EDU + GOV domains seems to be a great source of random links, that always exist but may never be altered.

Nice post - I'm getting more and more convinced that there actually is no such thing as black hat and the whole SEO stuff is a combination of some 3,000 headsmacking tips - the more you know the better SEO you are :-)